The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page B

gloves. Her dislike of soiled things was so strong that even at this moment, even after there had opened this breach between them, she had to cry out, “Why, what has happened to my gloves! I thought they were clean, and look at all those little brown marks.”
    “That is blood,” said Laurence; “there must have been sharp thorns on those roses.”
    He raised a half-finished glass of wine to his lips, though a smear of rouge on the rim showed that the little bride had drunk from it.
    She looked past him into the distance, at the emerald-green chestnut, the gold-green planes, tossing and writhing together. She felt herself back in the courtyard, her body forcing itself into the unfamiliar and detestable hieroglyphic of rage; she saw Michel’s old eyes sagging forward in astonishment; she heard, high up in the sunlit air above her, a metallic clash. She said, “So it was you who threw open the window?”
    “Yes,” he answered. “That’s where Madame Dupont-Gaillard lives, in one of those flats.”
    She found herself resorting to the pitiful expedient of a little laugh. “Did I look very dreadful?”
    “Well, I gathered you were not feeling very pleased with Monsieur de Verviers,” he said, resorting to the same expedient. He drank some more of the little bride’s wine. “I had no idea,” he told her as he set down the glass, “that you were such a maenad.”
    “I am not,” she told him.
    He gave a good-humoured smile, as if to tell her she need not keep up pretences with him any longer and could be assured that, now he knew her temperamental peculiarities, he would watch her career with amused and not unkindly interest.
    “I have never done such a thing before in my life,” she insisted. But he continued to smile, and she became aware that she had raised her voice a tone higher than she had meant. Biting her lips, she began to pull on her gloves, making every movement as calm as she could.
    Laurence gesticulated to the waiter for the bill, sat back in his chair, and passed his handkerchief over his lips. Impulsively, as if he were so sorry for having mismanaged their scene together that he must apologize even if this destroyed the pretence that they had had no scene, he said, “I thought you would understand when I told you that I had been calling on Madame Dupont-Gaillard. She has a plate up in the hallway.”
    “Yes,” said Isabelle, “but it is very old, the letters are quite level with the brass, you cannot see what they are.”
    For now she had remembered how it was that she had heard the name, though she had never seen it. She and André had come in very late, and while he fumbled for his keys under a light, she had stopped by the plate and run her fingers over the hardly perceptible ups and downs of the vanishing letters. “Tell me whose name has time licked off, like a cat cleaning a saucer?” she had whispered, and André had whispered back, “It is an institutrice, Madame Dupont-Gaillard, who like Château Gaillard is in ruins.” His whisper had ended on her lips, his arm had clasped her waist more tightly, and they had moved, mouth to mouth, towards his home. With quiet fierceness, with an assumed smile, she turned to Laurence, meaning to tell him of that midnight conversation so that he would guess the parts she would be mum about, meaning to hurt him. Jealousy she knew not to be so strong in his sex as it was in hers; women objected to marrying widowers far more than men objected to marrying widows. But in its lesser quantity it was there, and could be roused and tortured; and if it were tortured enough, her mind sprang on to say, it would go mad and try to prove itself as good as the other male, claiming its own. She had only to speak her story in the right way, with certain hesitancies, and she would end that afternoon in Laurence’s arms, and she knew well that, if he were once her lover, she would never lose him.
    She shuddered with distaste. She was being swept away into the